A backyard beer bar is coming to this old house in Clovis. ‘Kind of like a unicorn’

From the street, The Backyard Social Club is fairly nondescript; an old house along a commercial stretch of Clovis Avenue just north of Shaw.

Minus the signage, you might miss it driving by.

Inside, though, is something else: a quirky southwestern-themed craft beer bar and live music venue, with two floors and a massive backyard patio. “This is kind of like a unicorn,” says Craig Johnson, who will open the bar with wife Andrea and business partners Andrew O’Brien and Michelle Guevara later this month.

Johnson, known for designing eccentric bar spaces, is the guy behind The Howlin Wolf and Goldstein’s Mortuary and Delicatessen in Fresno’s Tower District.

The Backyard Social Club is a Clovis version of that, he says.

It’s Goldstein’s, “but a little more country-western.”

Down Memory Lane

The space had been vacant for most of the last decade, Johnson says, but the building dates back to at least the 1970s, when the owner added an bar on to the original house.

For a while, it operated as the Backyard Bar and Grill and at one point in the 1980s housed an all-ages nightclub. It had also been a photo studio, called Memory Lane, and a hair salon.

The chairs were set up facing a long mirror behind the bar.

So, much of what you see inside the Backyard Social Club is original to the building. The ornate wooden bar is the same, along with a series of stained glass windows that somehow remain unbroken.

The wood beams and staircase are all original, along with a fireplace you see as you come in the back door.

Johnson added pops of color: a southwestern motif of line work art done in orange, yellow, brown and turquoise, and several desert-themed murals (think cactus and tumbleweeds, a silhouetted cowboy on horseback).

“This place has so many nooks and crannies to decorate,” Johnson says.

Anything not original to the space was likely repurposed.

The booths were rescued from the Sugar Pine Smoke House in Madera when it was demolished.

A set of old Pabst Blue Ribbon wall lamps were picked up at a yard sale somewhere, as were the two carousel horses Johnson added to the partition in front of the bar.

Johnson spent a full weekend tracking down a wall’s worth of old stereo speakers to decorate a stage area, where the bar will host live music seven days a week. There’s an upright piano at the side of the stage that they got for free, needing only to tune it, Johnson says.

The tap handles for the beer — 20 inside and another 10 on the outside patio — are old sports trophies from the closet at Omega Trophy Shop.

The 16-foot shuffleboard table upstairs was picked up from Mecca Billiards in downtown Fresno during its going out-of-business sale.

The backyard, barbecues

Of course, the exterior is an important as the interior. Behind the house is a large patio and shaded back yard.

At the center is a massive gnarl of a walnut tree, which O’ Brian has been told is the largest and oldest in Clovis. It shades a small fish pond, a fire pit and several picnic tables set up in the grass.

There’s also a ping-pong table situated next to the garage, which has been converted into a small arcade.

Just off the patio is the bar’s kitchen, visible under a giant red arrow of a sign that says “food.” The menu has pizza, sandwiches, nachos and the like, but patrons can also reserve one of several barbecues set up around the backyard and grill their own food.

There will also be hot dogs available for sale.

30 taps of craft beer

O’ Brien and Guevara will run day-to-day operations at the bar.

Both used to be managers at Goldstein’s and say the selection of beer will be similar to the one there. There will be 30 beers on tap, with an emphasis on hard-to-find and limited releases from small, local craft breweries and larger, regional ones.

You’ll likely see beers from Russian River Brewery, for example, but also from newer places such as Reborne Brewing Company, which is in Clovis just up the road from the bar.

There will also be more mainstream brews (cans of Montucky have become popular) and some non alcoholic choices.

“We’re not snobby,” Guevara says. “We’ll have something for everybody.”

The Backyard Social Club will hold a soft opening in two weeks, with an official opening July 20. Hours of operation are noon to 10 p.m., daily, and you have to be 21 to enter.